Sprint Prepaid Cellular Phones - How to get one!Sprint prepaid cellular phones; do they exist?! A lot of people are searching for information on this topic. After researching some of the top Google hits that come up for this topic, I was quickly able to see that amazingly no one directly answers this question. I was truly surprised at how little useful information shows up for people looking for Sprint prepaid cellular phones. So, this section is dedicated to answering this question, and providing details around your options for Sprint no contract cell phones. I also include other information around this topic related to the Sprint's prepaid strategy, and my opinions that hopefully you'll find valuable, or at least interesting. Boost Mobile is Sprint's Prepaid Offering Simply put, Sprint does not have a prepaid product under its core Sprint Nextel brand. Below you'll read more about why this is, whether this is the right approach, and what I believe they should be doing ;-), but for now, the straight answer is no - you can't get no contract Sprint prepaid cellular phones under the 
Sprint
brand. But don't fret!
Sprint does
have a great CDMA network, with good coverage, industry leading data
speeds, as well as an iDEN network that has industry best-in-class high
performance Walkie-Talkie (also known as Push To Talk). If
you
want to take advantage of either of these networks, you do have
options. You can go the Boost route, or the MVNO
route.
Let's take a look at each of these no contract options.A little history about Boost - Boost Mobile started out in Australia as a fairly small lifestyle prepaid brand with imagery of surfers and skaters. It did well given its size and even expanded into New Zealand. The founder of Boost, Peter Adderton, went in search of a partner to launch the brand in North America. Ultimately he ended up in a joint venture with Nextel (prior to the Sprint Nextel merger). It was a great partnership because Nextel was an enterprise product, which meant that they could sell services to consumers with minimal network cost because consumers tend to use their phones mostly during the evenings and weekends when business customers are not. It worked out quite well and took off with amazing growth. After the success, Nextel bought Boost. So Boost became a wholly owned subsidiary of Nextel, similar to Toyota and Lexus, or Coke and Sprite. Except for Australia and New Zealand, Nextel now owned the worldwide rights to the Boost brand, and they continued to expand the offering nationwide. It took on a evolution of the brand from surf and skate to hip hop. Arguably people were buying it because they wanted a prepaid Nextel offering, and didn't really care about the brand; more on that later! Then came the merger with Sprint Nextel, which is now classified by many as the worst failure in the history of mergers in the United States...but that's a story for another day! Anyway, that's how Boost became part of Sprint.
 So, Boost is the prepaid
division of Sprint.
They basically take select phones from the parent company and
modify them to Boost them up. But don't be fooled, it's
mostly
basic features to enable prepaid features, and some different colors
and logos; nothing mind blowing. Boost offers plans on both
the
iDEN and CDMA networks with different plan features. You can
review the plans by visiting the Compare
Prepaid Plans page.
Note
that customer care is completely different, and the services are
completely disconnected to what's available on Sprint. Aside
from
sharing the same platform vendor (Amdocs), HR, IT, etc., from a
consumer perspective, it really looks like a completely different
company. This has its merits and disadvantages depending on
your
perspective. Click on the following links to learn more about
Sprint prepaid cellular phones.
Or Jump To:
Compare Prepaid Wireless Plans
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